The Longest Autumn
red oak in snow (all photos in this post by Dave Bonta except where indicated)
Every autumn the first hard frost comes later. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, when we were engaged in intensive gardening, we could expect a hard frost in the first week of October. Gradually, as the years passed, the hard frost date arrived in the second week. Then, in this century, it moved into the third week. And last October it finally came on October 28.
Just as the date for the first hard frost has advanced year by year, so too has mild autumn weather. Instead of several days of Indian summer weather at the beginning of November, we have stretches of Indian summer weather throughout November and, last autumn, well into December.
Final leaf fall is also later every year. In the seventies and even into the eighties, we could count on a brisk wind at the end of October shaking down every last leaf and leaving us with the bare branches of November. Yet despite last October’s heavy snowstorm, most of our red, black, white, chestnut and scarlet oaks held on to the majority of their leaves until the third week of November.
Remembering the previous year’s mid-October snowstorm that brought down so many trees and branches overburdened with leaves and snow, I was apprehensive when I woke to snow on October 29. As the snow piled up on leaves and branches, I walked down our road, dreading to hear the sound of breaking branches, but I heard only a few. Once I picked up an oak branch, its leaves heavy with snow, and marveled at its weight.
Later in the day, the thermometer slowly rose to 34 degrees. The trees dripped even as it continued snowing, but the warmth saved most of our leafy trees. The one casualty I found was a large, live, black oak along our road. But it was hollow throughout much of its trunk length and would have come down soon in any case.
bottom of the First Field in an October snowstorm
By November most of the snow had melted, and we finally had a couple weeks of what is normally “October’s bright, blue weather” and dazzling leaf color after a mostly soggy October. The sugar maples along the Far Field Road were still a blaze of red and gold. The coppery gold of American beeches lit up the hollow. And from Alan’s Bench, I gazed at the oaks of Laurel Ridge, which glowed reddish-gold and burnt orange.
Although I saw an occasional buck during my walks, squirrels, chipmunks, and turkeys were scarce. What few acorns the oaks had produced had been plucked from their branches by blue jays weeks before. I also saw little evidence of hickory nuts. Even our black walnut yard trees hadn’t produced many nuts. After the previous year’s feast, the wildlife was faced with famine. As soon as I put my bird feeders up, in early November, they were mobbed by gray squirrels and chipmunks.
The birds were not as affected even though our wild grape crop had also failed. Berry eaters, such as robins, cedar waxwings, and bluebirds still called most warm days. Carolina wrens caroled back and forth in our yard. The female tapping cardinal returned to our stairwell window. Winter wrens called and bounced up and down beside the stream. Golden-crowned kinglets foraged in the spruce grove. And, in Margaret’s Woods one day, I found dozens of singing, foraging white-throated sparrows, several dark-eyed juncos, a Carolina wren, and at least one fox sparrow in a large hedge of multiflora rose covered with bright red rose hips.
Raptors, too, were plentiful. A male American kestrel sat on his favorite power pole overlooking our First Field. On a hazy warm day in late November a male northern harrier flew silently past me as I sat on Coyote Bench. Driving down our hollow road, I flushed a sharp-shinned hawk. And on Thanksgiving Day our son Steve and his wife Pam watched a barred owl swoop down on a tree branch beside the Far Field Road. Steve also saw a golden eagle migrating along Sapsucker Ridge that day.
Hermit Thrush in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, November 9, 2011 (photo by Christopher Eliot, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial licence)
But I had the most unexpected sighting of Thanksgiving. As I circled the Far Field on Pennyroyal Trail, I flushed a hermit thrush. Never had I seen one so late in the season. When I checked McWilliams’s and Brauning’s The Birds of Pennsylvania, it reinforced my belief that hermit thrush migration peaks during October, which is when we usually see them. By the second week in November most hermit thrushes have moved south. A few winter over at low elevations in Pennsylvania, particularly in the Piedmont area. But more surprising than my sighting occurred three days later, on a warm November 27, when our son Dave heard a singing hermit thrush on Laurel Ridge. Since we rarely hear one singing here during spring migration, we were especially surprised to hear one so late in the autumn.
Whether it was the acorn failure or merely the lure of our birdseed, we had many excellent views of southern flying squirrels at our feeder area. Because it was still warm and some bears were no doubt still about, I brought in my feeders every night throughout November and December. On Thanksgiving evening I turned on the back porch light before going out to retrieve the feeders. A flying squirrel was busily scarfing up seeds on the porch floor. So intent was it that my husband Bruce was able to take several photos of the creature through the storm door. It only fled down the steps when I went out to get the feeders.
My next sighting was the first of December when I watched one flying squirrel chase off another on the birdseed-covered ground below the back step. The victor continued eating, even burying most of its body beneath the grass and seeds in its quest for food.
A full moon illuminated the sky on the tenth of December when Bruce startled a flying squirrel on the back porch. It zipped up the porch railing and sailed over near the juniper tree where it made a rough landing and disappeared down slope. The next evening I surprised the flying squirrel on the back porch steps, and it performed the same maneuver as it had for Bruce the previous night.
flying squirrel on a black locust tree in Plummer’s Hollow
We saw at least one flying squirrel at our feeder area throughout December, and we thought it was only fair that we should feed flying squirrels at night since we hosted at least 11 gray squirrels by day.
Whether or not the flying squirrels were affected by the unusual warmth, at least one woodchuck was. Below the back porch a fat male woodchuck continued to emerge from his hole every afternoon to eat the fresh greenery on the slope into December. The last time I saw him was mid afternoon on December 22, again a record breaker here for a woodchuck. Usually, they are tucked into their hibernation dens by mid-November and we don’t see any until the following February when the males are busy visiting female dens.
Plants also responded to the continual warmth. Several so-called green immigrant flowers, those that came from over seas, bloomed later than I could remember. On November 27 I found a pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea) blooming beside Alan’s Bench. A member of the Composite family, it was once dried and used in making memorial wreaths and for decorating vases and wall brackets. Today it still appears in dried flower arrangements. Its small, white, globular-shaped flowers grow in clusters atop a cottony stem with thin, toothless leaves that are sage-green above and woolly-white beneath. Other names for it are silverleaf, cottonweed, lady-never-fade, Indian posy and ladies’-tobacco. Since it came from Europe, Indian posy seems inappropriate and I doubt whether ladies smoked it. But they did use it for coughs and as a poultice for bruises in pioneer days. Its latest blooming month, according to Rhoads’s and Block’s The Plants of Pennsylvania, is October, which was why I was amazed to find it flowering in late November.
On that same day several forsythia flowers blossomed on a scattering of branches. Forsythia originated in South China where it grew wild. The Chinese called it golden bell. Robert Fortune, a young Scot, was sent into China to collect new plants for the Royal Horticultural Society of London in 1845, three years after the Opium War, when westerners were resented and mistrusted. So Fortune, disguised as a Chinese man, dressed in native garb and wearing a pigtail, explored the South China coast with a crew of Chinese workmen in springtime. There he found the countryside filled with forsythia. Although he later named it for the second curator of London’s Chelsea Gardens—William Forsyth—who was also a Scot, golden bell is a more evocative name that was quickly forgotten.
Dandelions also thrived in our driveway and during this longest autumn, I found a dandelion blooming on Butterfly Loop on December 5. It too came over with the colonists who used it as a cleansing herb and pot herb. It probably originated in Asia Minor long before anyone thought to notice it because both the Greeks and the Romans cultivated it. The Chinese called it earth nail and used its long taproot and green leaves for food and medicine while in Japan it was grown as a decorative plant. In Britain, the Celts used it for both food and wine and the Anglo-Saxon tribes that settled in the British Isles after the Romans left valued it as cure for scurvy and as a laxative and diuretic. Here in Pennsylvania, the Germans grew dandelion in their gardens and even today the Amish value and use the plant in early spring. Years ago, I too harvested the leaves every spring and served them with an Amish bacon dressing that I devised.
dandelion seedhead
As the warm weather persisted, so too did Lyme disease ticks and I continued to pick them off my pants throughout December. Even on December 15 it was 54 degrees late in the day.
It rained on the winter solstice and the following day. But it was back to Indian summer the next two days before winter weather finally settled in, at least for a short time. What changes I have seen during my 41 years here on our central Pennsylvania mountaintop. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined, back in the 1970s, when autumn began at the beginning of September and ended at the end of November that the seasons would shift and autumn would become the longest season of the year.
June Surprises
June is often the most exciting month of the year. Then I can count on close encounters with black bears on our trails. Not only are last year’s cubs on their own, but their mothers are being hotly pursued by eager males.
northern brown snake (photo by Paula Scott)
We also add new species to Bioplum, a natural inventory of our property. But last June 5 we added a record three species in one day. Our caretaker family — Troy and Paula Scott — found a northern brown snake in their yard and promptly photographed it. Formerly named DeKay’s brown snake—Storeria dekayi dekayi—its species name still honors nineteenth century naturalist James Edward DeKay. According to Amphibians and Reptiles of Pennsylvania and the Northeastby Hulse, McCoy, and Censky, the northern brown snake “reaches its greatest densities in and around abandoned human habitation.” That made sense because the Scotts’ home is directly above the derelict home of our deceased neighbor, Margaret McHugh.
Painted turtle in Plummer’s Hollow (photo: Paula Scott)
Later in the day, the Scotts saw a painted turtle on our road. It was probably a female looking for a nesting site because from late May to early July they leave slow-moving water in search of a gentle slope exposed to the sun in which to deposit their eggs.
I was disappointed to miss those two new species, but I was able to see the third new one of the day. Our friend, Lucy Boyce, who specializes in native plants, spent several hours with our son Dave in our three-acre deer exclosure, searching for new plants. The phone rang, and Dave told me to come and see two wild coffee plants — Triosteum perfoliatum — blooming in the wet, overgrown section of the exclosure.
Frankly, I had never heard of wild coffee, also called perfoliate horse gentian, fever-root, feverwort, and tinker’s-weed. Its erect stem has several pairs of large, opposite, oval, pointed leaves that meet and surround the stem. In the axils of the leaves grow reddish-brown or greenish elongated, bell-shaped flowers. It likes rich, moist woods and thickets, such as ours, and flowers in May and early June.
Wild coffee (photo: Dave Bonta)
But even better than finding new species and seeing bears on our trails last June was my unexpected encounter with a rare animal. On a gorgeous day in mid-June, I slowly ascended Big Tree Trail on Sapsucker Ridge. It was a pleasant 63 degrees at 9:00 a.m. as I continued my walk along our forested ridgetop.
Suddenly, I saw what I thought was a small gray squirrel coming towards me. It ran to a tree, climbed about three feet from the ground, and clung to the tree trunk. But instead of a fluffy tail, its tail was very long, thin, and sparsely-haired. Then it turned its head toward me and it didn’t look like the face of a squirrel, but like that of an overgrown white-footed mouse. I had only time to notice its large, roundish, shell-shaped ears, and its big, dark eyes before it jumped off the tree and disappeared. But I was almost certain that it was an Allegheny woodrat.
Years ago, on October 4, 1989 — my husband Bruce and our eldest son Steve had a perfect view of an Allegheny woodrat while driving up our hollow road at 10:45 p.m. What the woodrat was doing there was a mystery because its habitat, as described then in the literature, didn’t fit the supposed requirements of an Allegheny woodrat. They live in caves and talus slopes and the nearest talus slope on the far side of Sapsucker Ridge was farther away than a woodrat’s range.
Cal Butchkoski often squeezes into tight places in search of Allegheny woodrats (photo: Bruce Bonta)
Their intriguing sighting led me to learn more about this native packrat. And, the following autumn, Bruce and I accompanied PGC Wildlife Technician Cal Butchkoski, as he climbed a hundred foot high rock outcropping in an old-growth hemlock forest. As part of a study by the Game Commission that began in 1982, he had set 40 live traps baited with apples for woodrats in the caves and crevices the evening before and wanted to release any captives as quickly as possible to minimize stress on the animals.
But when he released a male on my lap so Bruce could take photographs, the woodrat seemed anything but stressed. He spent several long, camera-clicking minutes climbing on my jean-clad legs before leaping gracefully to the floor of the cave and disappearing under a dead pile of leaves that was, in reality, his home. Made of sticks, shredded bark, grass and dried leaves, woodrat homes range in shape from cone-shaped to flattened.
At that time, Butchkoski showed us pencil-eraser-sized droppings in its latrine site under a nearby ledge which serve as a signpost for anyone looking for woodrats. These droppings last for decades and, depending on their condition, researchers can determine whether or not woodrats are still in residence. Needless to say, Bruce and our sons combed the talus slopes on Sapsucker Ridge but didn’t find any latrines.
Male Allegheny woodrat posing on author’s lap (photo: Bruce Bonta)
While Bruce’s and Steve’s sighting seemed unusual because of the woodrat’s distance from its rock habitat, mine was equally surprising because Allegheny woodrats are nocturnal. On the other hand, even though it has been 20 years since I last looked into the ecology of Allegheny woodrats, researchers are still puzzled by many aspects of their lives.
Much has changed too. Back then the Allegheny woodrat was considered to be a subspecies of the eastern woodrat (Neotoma floridana) which ranges south to Florida and west to Colorado. It had lost its original species status Neotoma magister in 1957 when researchers had relegated it to subspecies status based on comparative studies of eastern woodrat skulls and skins. But using new molecular methods, researchers conducted mitochondrial DNA analyses of 114 woodrats from 33 locations and proved that Allegheny woodrats are indeed a separate species from eastern woodrats. In 1997 they were once again listed as Neotoma magister in the Revised Checklist of North American Mammals.
Furthermore, Allegheny woodrats are ecologically distinct from eastern woodrats because they live almost exclusively in caves, boulder fields, and talus slopes consisting of sandstone and/or limestone—so-called rock habitats. They build their nests on cave ledges, like the one we saw with Butchkoski, or in rock crevices
Cal Butchkoski weighs an Allegheny woodrat (photo: Bruce Bonta)
Females claim the best habitats to construct their nests and raise their young. They breed as early as mid-March in Pennsylvania, and, after about 35 days, give birth to one to four naked, blind young. Their eyes open at two-and-a-half weeks, and they nurse until they are a month old. Then, although they may remain with their mother for a while, they begin to do their own foraging for leaves, fruit, mast, fungi, and even twigs. Once they are on their own, they build individual nests, because woodrats are solitary animals except during the breeding season. They don’t hibernate so they are busy collecting and drying food, such as fungi and fern fronds, to stuff into crevices for winter consumption. For the most part, they “exhibit high site fidelity and low dispersal rates,” according to researchers.
But Dr. Janet Wright and her students of Dickinson College, radiotracked an adult male for two years. He moved suddenly 3.6 miles along a ridgetop to a new site. She also discovered that woodrats will travel “considerable distances beyond the protection of rock slides in search of food and mates.”
Another researcher, Dr. Petra Bohall Wood, in West Virginia, found that woodrats, particularly males, do move away from their birth site between their juvenile and adult years. From these studies and others I looked at, I hypothesized that the woodrat I encountered still had its grayer youngster coat and was either searching for food or dispersing. The previous fall had been a terrific mast year when woodrats are especially prolific so perhaps young woodrats were more inclined to find a new home. And that woodrat Bruce and Steve saw years before was probably also dispersing.
There is another extensive talus slope less than a mile away on our neighbor’s property. Unfortunately, it had been heavily logged the previous year which may have sent any woodrats living there in search of a new home, because recent studies seem to indicate that the best habitat surrounding rocky areas should include an oak/hickory forest rich in mast. In fact, a large intact forest buffer 1.2 miles from the forest edge is ideal, something we don’t have below our talus slopes but do on our ridgetop.
Pennsylvania is thought to have five percent of the world’s population of Allegheny woodrats. Most of the population is now in the Appalachian south, although more study of populations needs to be done in those areas. It has gone extinct in Connecticut, New York, and the southeastern portion of Pennsylvania where it used to be common. Pennsylvania has relegated Allegheny woodrats to threatened status, and they are protected under the Game and Wildlife Code. Game Commission biologists, including Butchkoski, have been engaged in long-term monitoring to find out how dense populations are at each site. Previously, from 1982 to 2006, Pennsylvania biologists conducted 1,255 surveys at 802 habitat sites and found evidence of current or former woodrat occupation at 443 sites. Of those sites, 246 were still active and 197 were not. They hope to maintain breeding populations in the Appalachian Plateau, Ridge and Valley Province, and the upper Susquehanna River drainage.
The Allegheny woodrat returns to his home after release (photo: Bruce Bonta)
But why are Allegheny woodrats disappearing? That question has haunted researchers from the beginning, and over the years a number of suggestions have been made. After all, their rock habitats are not very accessible to most people. Researcher Kathleen LoGludice summed up biologists’ hypotheses in The Allegheny Woodrat; Ecology, Conservation and Management of a Declining Species edited by J.D. Peles and Janet Wright. First and foremost, is a decrease in food that began with the disappearance of the predictable, yearly crop of American chestnuts and then the woodrats tried to adjust to boom-and-bust acorn cycles, especially during years of heavy gypsy moth infestation when oaks are too stressed to produce any acorns.
Habitat fragmentation caused by new or widened roads, quarries, industrial wind farms, utility lines, communication towers, and natural gas drilling rigs makes it increasingly difficult for woodrats to move safely from one rock habitat to another.
Finally, as packrats, they collect both edible and inedible material. One “midden,” as it is called, examined in Centre County in 1941, contained three quarts of deer pellets. Three other middens discovered by the same researcher yielded a baseball cover, can labels, a cigarette pack, cloth, a shoe heel, yarn, rusty tin cans and pieces of string. None of these items pose a threat to Allegheny woodrats. But as their habitat fragments and residential and agricultural fields move closer, generalist species, especially raccoons, increase. With raccoons come raccoon roundworm which is fatal to woodrats that collect and eat raccoon feces.
Raccoons also prey on woodrats as do great horned owls, coyotes, weasels, fishers, and black rat snakes. We certainly have abundant numbers of these creatures on our property. And hopefully my sighting is a sign that we have a population of Allegheny woodrats too.
Neotoma magister, female and two babies, Lowe Gap cave, Bledsoe County, TN (Creative Commons-licensed photo by Alan Cressler)
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For more information on this charismatic animal, consult the Pennsylvania Game Commission website. The Allegheny Woodrat: Ecology, Conservation and Management of a Declining Species, edited by J.D. Peles and Janet Wright, is also an excellent source.
Marcia with golden eagle (photo by Todd Katzner)
Marcia Bonta is the author of nine books and over 300 magazine articles. The blog portion of this website includes her popular “Naturalist’s Eye” column from Pennsylvania Game News, reprinted here on the 1st of each month. Unlike typical blog entries, these columns are written months in advance, usually about things that happened during the previous year. Read more…
